Visual Arts Reviews
Victorian Giants, National Portrait Gallery review - pioneers of photographyThursday, 15 March 2018
It is a very human crowd at Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography. There are the slightly melancholic portraits of authoritative and bearded male Victorian eminences, among them Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle and Sir John Herschel. Read more... |
Murillo: The Self-Portraits, National Gallery review - edged with darknessTuesday, 06 March 2018
Mortality inflects commemoration. So it is with portraiture: the likeness – particularly those which celebrate lives of status and accomplishment – will always be limned with death. Read more... |
All Too Human, Tate Britain review - life in the rawSaturday, 03 March 2018
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray far from the brutal and disturbing. Read more... |
Another Kind of Life, Barbican review - intense encounters with marginal livesFriday, 02 March 2018
“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. Read more... |
Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World, Whitechapel Gallery review - handsome installationsFriday, 16 February 2018
On entering the gallery, you are greeted by the cheeping of birds. Read more... |
Emil Nolde: Colour Is Life, National Gallery of Ireland review - boats, dancers, flowersThursday, 15 February 2018
Colours had meanings for Emil Nolde. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.” As the son of a German-Frisian father and a Schleswig-Dane mother, Nolde was raised in a pious household on the windswept flat land on the border on Germany and Denmark that his family farmed. Read more... |
Andreas Gursky, Hayward Gallery review - staggering scale, personal perspectiveTuesday, 06 February 2018
“Let the light in” has been the fundraising slogan for the two-year project to revamp and modernise the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, and adjacent Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. And that is just what has happened, with two triumphs at the Hayward. Read more... |
Charles I: King and Collector, Royal Academy review - a well executed display of tasteTuesday, 30 January 2018
Titian! Mantegna! Rubens! Dürer! Veronese! Van Dyck! Raphael! Velazquez! About 140 works which were once part of Charles I’s 2,000-strong collection are reunited in a sumptuous collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Royal Collection. Read more... |
Come to Dust: Glenn Brown, Gagosian Gallery review - seductive and disturbingMonday, 29 January 2018
When I began studying art history, my Bible was Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The reproductions are mostly in black and white and, thumbing through my dusty old copy, I find a photograph of the Jesuit church in Rome, whose ceiling was transformed by the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli into a glorious vista of the heavens teaming with cherubs, angels and saints. Read more... |
Lumiere London review - London in a different lightSaturday, 20 January 2018
It seems they’re having trouble with the lights. Thirty-five past five and they’re not yet on. “Typical,” laughs a woman, surveying the huddle of hi-vis chaperones. Palm fronds wave in the wind, suits leave work. St James’s Square slowly fills with people. The huddle of technicians breaks up and in a short moment, candy coloured bulbs strung in rainbow belts between plane trees light up and everyone goes “Oooooh” and gets out their phone. Read more... |
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